Sports gambling giant DraftKings and energy company Entergy spent a combined $107,398 on a 2025 Super Bowl weekend for House Speaker Jason White, House Public Utilities Chairman Brent Powell, White’s staff and a couple of their spouses.
The companies, which stand to make millions from state government actions for which they are lobbying, spent more than White’s annual salary of $85,000 wining and dining the speaker, Powell and staff on a one-weekend Super Bowl trip to New Orleans. The trip was first reported in a 2025 Mississippi Today article. The special interest spending was only recently made public in official lobbying reports because of Mississippi’s weak lobbying laws and reporting requirements.
State lobbying laws give the clients of lobbyists, in this case DraftKings and Entergy, until the end of a year to document gifts to public officials. Even though White’s Super Bowl trip took place in February of 2025, it only appeared in state documents nearly a year later, after lobbying reports were due on Jan. 30. And when it did appear, the initial report DraftKings filed documenting the expense was inaccurate and was later updated.
The Mississippi House has passed legislation to legalize mobile sports betting for three years in a row, first passing it the year before White became Speaker. But the measures have died in the Senate. In 2025, days after House lawmakers voted to legalize online betting for the second time, the speaker’s staffers were enjoying the hospitality of DraftKings at its Super Bowl weekend festivities.
Entergy spent a total of $47,398 on tickets, dinner and lodging for White, his wife, Rep. Powell and Powell’s wife. As chairman of the House Public Utilities Committee, Powell has some oversight of Entergy, the state’s largest energy company.
Powell declined to comment on the trip.
In 2025, Entergy spent over $300,000 lobbying the Legislature to advance its interests. Such efforts can reap significant rewards, though lawmakers have said such lobbying doesn’t influence their policy decisions.
For example, in 2024, the Legislature granted Entergy the authority to build power-generating facilities without obtaining the normally required approval from the Public Service Commission. The deal is part of a $10-billion state agreement with Amazon Web Services. This session, the House has passed a bill requested by Entergy for the state to loan the company $200 million to cover damages from Winter Storm Fern.
In a statement, Leyla Goodsell, an Entergy spokesperson, said the company had access to a limited number of Super Bowl game tickets, some of which were assigned to a suite specifically for its guests.
“Entergy Mississippi, an operating company of Entergy Corporation, invited Speaker White and Representative Powell and their spouses to attend the event as our guests,” Goodsell said. “As always, Entergy will comply with all federal, state and local regulations.”
DraftKings, one of the nation’s highest-grossing gaming companies, has invested heavily in lobbying for legal online betting in Mississippi and other states. It spent $60,000 on box seat tickets for three members of White’s staff and one of their spouses, who documented the trip on social media. Mississippi Today found that the social media posts were later edited to remove any mention of DraftKings after the news outlet began asking questions about the trip.
DraftKings initially filed a lobbying report on Jan. 29 that showed a $60,000 expense for Super Bowl tickets for Jason White. But the company changed the report to say it bought tickets for White’s staff, not the speaker himself. Mississippi law says lobbyists must document gifts for all public employees, not just the officials these employees work for.
On Feb. 6, DraftKings filed a corrected report removing Speaker White’s name and inserting four expenditures worth $15,000 each for three members of the speaker’s staff and one of their spouses.
White didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment on the trip when Mississippi Today published its initial story revealing the trip in 2025. When reached for comment in February on the lobbying reports, White told Mississippi Today his Super Bowl trip was never about sports betting.
“I went to meet with the board of directors from Entergy, which obviously is our largest utility provider in the state,” White said. “It’s where their home corporate office is, it’s where their entire board was. They were a major corporate sponsor of the Super Bowl. I never thought twice about being their guest. I enjoyed my time with them. I also enjoyed meeting other elected officials who were there as well during my time meeting with the Entergy folks.”
When asked why his staff attended the game on DraftKings’ dime, White said it was the result of an invitation that he passed along.
“They actually went as a last-minute invite because DraftKings had a box that had open seats and they called and invited me, and I said, ‘No, I’m already attending with Entergy,’ and they offered that to my staff and some other staff in the building who went.’ For me, it was much ado about nothing. We passed mobile sports for multiple years, the trip was never about discussing legislation related to mobile sports,” White said. “It was nothing out of the ordinary for us. I know y’all have made lots of hay about it, but it didn’t change any perspectives for us, nor for the average Mississippian who is for mobile sports betting.”
Critics of Mississippi’s lobbying laws argue the practice of lavishing public officials with expensive gifts fosters distrust. One such critic is John Reeves, an attorney and former longtime Republican state representative. Reeves helped pass reform of Mississippi’s lobbying laws in the 1990s, including a ban on lobbyists paying for lawmakers’ rent. He said the price tag for the Super Bowl weekend exceeded much of what he witnessed while trying to rein in trips and high-dollar gifts for lawmakers.
“That’s just absolutely off the charts. I hate to be criticizing people. I don’t like to do that,” Reeves said. “But my goodness, how can you explain getting a $15,000 ticket to the Super Bowl, and how that has anything to do with your public service? You can’t. And all that’s going to do is erode the public’s trust in government.”
The Republican speaker, one of the most powerful politicians in the state, has repeatedly said that legalizing mobile sports betting is one of his top priorities. Proponents such as White say legalization would be a financial boon to the state. It would also further enrich the gambling companies that facilitate online betting.
Estimates vary, but many say the state is missing out on between $30 million and $80 million a year in taxes as a black market for online betting continues to thrive. While specific revenue figures for DraftKings aren’t publicly projected, as one of the nation’s most dominant companies in the industry, it would likely compete for a significant share of Mississippi’s market.
The Boston-based sports gambling giant has been at the forefront of a years-long lobbying push to legalize online betting in Mississippi and around the country. In a statement, Stephen Miraglia, a DraftKings spokesperson, did not answer questions about what the company hoped to achieve by paying for these tickets or why it had to correct its initial lobbying report.
“On occasion, DraftKings hosts elected officials from around the country at live sporting events and is careful to ensure compliance with all state and federal lobbying disclosure requirements,” Miraglia said.
Around 40 states have some form of legalized sports betting, and over 20 have full online betting with multiple operators, according to Action Network, a sports betting application and news site. Some states have only in-person betting, and some only have a single online operator in the state. Mississippi allows sports betting now, but only inside casinos.
Mississippi has been one of the holdouts on online betting, in part due to fears that legalization could cut into the profits of brick-and-mortar casinos and increase the prevalence of gambling addiction, which some experts say is a growing problem. Influential religious institutions in the Bible Belt state have also opposed the spread of gambling.
On Feb. 8, the day before the 2025 Super Bowl, White reminded his social media followers that Mississippi had attempted to legalize mobile sports betting for three years.
This year, his chamber voted again to legalize online betting, this time tying the policy to a proposal to shore up financial support for the state’s struggling public employees’ pension system. It is unclear whether the proposal has the support to advance in the Senate.
That hasn’t stopped lobbyists from sports gambling companies, including DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesar’s, from spending money throughout the year on trips to sporting events and dinners out on the town for Mississippi politicians.
The state’s lobbying laws allow for a distinction between individual lobbyists and clients, leaving open to interpretation what lobbyists and their clients are required to report and when they’re required to report their expenses.
Reeves left the Legislature in 2008 and said public reporting regulations for lobbyists remain lax compared to other states, a status quo that sows public distrust. He believes the Legislature should pass new regulations requiring the clients of lobbyists to report the gifts they purchase for lawmakers within 30 days. He also thinks lawmakers should raise their own salaries to disincentivize them from accepting gifts from lobbyists.
“In a perfect world, they would set the salary of the Legislature at a rate that would encourage people to run for it and not expect freebies, like some states do. Because when you accept a trip like that, whether it’s benign or not, you couldn’t convince one person in the public that it doesn’t influence the vote of those members,” Reeves said. “It’s the appearance of impropriety.”
John Pelissero, professor emeritus of political science and a government ethics scholar at Loyola University Chicago, told Mississippi Today that delays in disclosing lobbying or campaign finance information create an “absence of transparency.”
DraftKings and Entergy filed their required lobbying reports on time. But because current state law requires only an annual filing, the public cannot see how major industries lobby lawmakers until long after the regular legislative session is over.
“If you find out about this a year after the Super Bowl, it loses its significance because it’s so long after the event took place,” Pelissero said.
He added that several states are pushing for more frequent reporting requirements for elected officials and lobbyists to provide the public with timelier information.
“What more frequent sharing of information does is serve the public interest by providing more information,” Pelissero said.
Editor’s note: Warwick Sabin, the CEO of Deep South Today, parent company of Mississippi Today, attended an Entergy-sponsored reception in New Orleans the morning before the Super Bowl in 2025. The event was not at the Superdome. He did not have any editorial involvement in this article or Mississippi Today’s previous articles about Mississippi lawmakers, legislative staffers and some spouses receiving an expenses-paid trip to the 2025 Super Bowl.
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